Summary

Dragonchain was created to provide blockchain architecture for entities who wish to keep their data private while also entirely taking advantage of the security that comes from public blockchains. Dragonchain will also provide a commercial platform for the rapid launch of blockchain applications that can be created with popular programming languages. The final aspect of the Dragonchain platform is their DragonFund Incubator, which is designed to provide guidance and quickly launch new blockchain projects.

Overview

Dragonchain will help simplify and standardize blockchain application development, something much needed in this emerging sector. They plan to do so by providing products and services around best practices, infrastructure, and application architecture. Finally, the architecture will allow blockchain-powered business logic to be created, tested, and run in production before having to add in any blockchain economics, such as mining rewards, staking, utility tokens, or payments from existing currencies, like Bitcoin.

Dragonchain’s architecture is designed as a multi-tier blockchain solution which uses low level, internal blockchains to provide data consensus and security for private data on internal networks controlled by the organization or provided by Dragonchain’s infrastructure platform. Similar to how sidechains are secured by occasionally writing a hash of their state to their parent blockchain, Dragonchain offers multi-tiered blockchains where each additional layer provides extra assurances around security and consensus. By splitting up business logic, validation, network diversity, and notary nodes into their blockchain, their architecture allows scalable enhanced security, and this security can be topped off by recording results on highly-secured public blockchains, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Following this architecture and guidance from the Dragonchain organization will help to establish best practices for this sector, something which is currently lacking.

Blockchain-backed applications currently lack more than just best practices. Intellectual capital, ease of development, and ease of deployment are also significant hindrances in today’s environment. For instance, to release code on the Ethereum blockchain, one must learn Solidity. To create a contract on Stellar’s network, you have to learn their SDK. Each smart chain’s language has its own set of pros, cons, knowns, and unknowns. The more powerful the language, the more dangerous the bugs are which can be potentially released into your code. Another huge downside to public blockchains is that your business logic will be publicly viewable and executable. Having your business logic exposed is undesirable and would be a massive compromise for any organization that needs to maintain data privacy while also using the blockchain for security and validation. Dragonchain will help ease this issue by allowing business logic to be run on private networks and machines under a business’s control. Should these internal business transactions need to be made public, they can be done so in a private manner by storing secure hashes of their data on public blockchains, while maintaining all private data locally on secure nodes or internal blockchains.

Developing blockchain applications is currently difficult due to the variety and limitations of each smart chain’s available APIs and SDKs. Dragonchain will ease that by using AWS Lambda’s serverless architecture service to run business logic. This architecture will allow developers to use widely known and testable languages, such as Go, Java, Node.js, Python, and C#, and this is a major win as these languages are well-understood and have immense intellectual capital behind them. Another critical aspect is all these languages have extensive testing frameworks essential for developing reliable applications and quickly troubleshooting any errors which may rear their heads.

The final significant advantage is allowing data surrounding business operations to be collected from deployed applications before implementing any currencies or adding tokenomics to the application. This is a major advantage over prematurely deploying blockchain-economized applications, which could be gamed since there are always edge cases and attacks which cannot be accounted for out of the gate. Proper application instrumentation and usage patterns will allow for much more refined tokenomics to be launched when the time is correct.

Token Use

The DRGN ERC20 token has a few critical uses: paying for Dragonchain services – such as their application platform, consulting, deployment of smart contracts – and to allow early access to Dragonchain incubator projects. The roadmap provided by Dragonchain shows that their AWS Serverless Platform and Heroku add-ons will be implemented in Q2 2018. AWS is the go-to for most organizations looking to launch applications. Heroku, owned by Salesforce , is a Platform as a Service that allows users to quickly launch applications by merely uploading code which has the proper industry standard 12-factor patterns applied. DRGN tokens can be used to pay for both of these resources and will allow for a recurring token utility.

To access and fund incubator projects, Dragonchain will look at the “Slumber Score” of an Ethereum address. This score is a custom calculation based on the amount of DRGN the address holds, as well as how long they’ve held those tokens. Holding more tokens for an extended period allows earlier access to incubator projects, thus providing a staking incentive for the token.

Points of Confidence

Excellent team

First big mover in providing blockchain best practices

Technology is implementable given current knowledge

Solid incubator projects already lined up

Tokens offer staking incentive and a utility function

Risks

Staking incentive will be lessened if the incubator projects fail to deliver

Dragonchain is still in its early stages

The Team

Joe Roets : CEO. Years of experience at Disney as a high-level engineer and architect who focuses on blockchain development.

Eileen Quenin : President Dragonchain Foundation. Three years’ experience at Disney and Dragonchain, overseeing implementation and deployment of blockchain technology.

George Sarhanis : Founder & CBO. Decades of experience managing internet and technology businesses. Most notable is his experience in the ’90s and early 2000s when Web businesses were just taking off.

Selected Advisors

Maria Smith : VP Payments Starbucks. Starbucks has explicitly expressed interest in using blockchain to power their payments and applications. [1] Starbucks had $22.4 billion in global revenue in 2017. [2] If they were to use Dragonchain services, that should introduce a substantial amount of liquidity to the token, along with setting a precedent for other large companies.

Bloq offers blockchain development and consulting for companies, nicely with Dragonchain’s one-off approach to internal enterprise blockchain applications and systems.

ICO

Tokens sold at public sale: 238,421,940 (55% total supply)

Total raised at public sale: $13,192,840

Token value: pegged to 107,978 DRGN/BTC

Crowdsale: October 2nd, 2017 – November 3rd, 2017

There is no published info on individual contribution caps or bonuses. The largest contribution from the audit was 169.56 BTC, which equates to 18,308,856 DRGN.

Conclusion

As blockchain adoption grows and more enterprises are looking for ways to implement the features offered by this new technology, there has been a severe need for platforms that provide ease of such an implementation. Dragonchain is one such platform that seems poised to handle part of this demand.

One of the most significant hurdles for blockchain adoption in the business space is the lack of technical know-how. Dragonchain’s business approach will give a flexible and thorough way of guiding the implementation of these new solutions, furthering the adoption of blockchain technology.

Through its incubation program, Dragonchain is also able to create its business platform ecosystem on the basis of its token, incentivizing anyone interested in incubation projects to stake DRGN. This will also have the synergistic effect of incentivizing the Dragonchain team to do a proper vetting of their incubated projects, making sure that high-quality projects receive attention. As long as the team retains an exceptional standard of quality, more interest is going to be garnered for Dragonchain’s solutions and its token ecosystem. As projects in its incubation program do not necessarily have to be ICOs, their ecosystem has the opportunity to reach beyond the blockchain space.

An interesting counterpart to Dragonchain would be Simple Token, [3] as they are both looking to target a similar market. However, Simple Token is giving simple access to a token economy based on their ecosystem, while Dragonchain helps build complete systems in a multi-layered process. What these do have in common is easing and speeding up the adoption of blockchain and token solutions and observing their growth will give a clearer understanding of the potential of such solutions.

Based on their excellent team, advisors, vision, and roadmap, Dragonchain should be a top blockchain company to keep in mind. They have the needed industry and business experience across their employees and advisors to become an established, leading business going forward. It is quite likely that Dragonchain could be the first widely used utility token with staking functionalities and will be an exciting business to watch – one in which the privacy of centralized solutions merges with the benefits of blockchain in a hybrid setup.

[3] For more details on how Simple Token works, see Ironwood’s report on Simple Token.

Disclaimer:

All content provided by IRG is purely observational and should not be considered financial advice. IRG is not an investment group, but a research group that meticulously scans the market for those projects deemed to have the most potential. Cryptoassets are subject to high market volatility and risk, invest responsibly at your own risk. Seek a licensed professional before making any investments.

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Decentral magazine is an online media, that treats daily news about cryptocurrency and ICO analysis. The DC team is composed of professional and enthusiastic crypto holders from around the globe. Our mission is to provide you with exclusive content in various languages.